Crystal Castles  (Atari)
Alternative title: Crystal Castles V1
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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(From GTW64) :

Crystal Castles V1
1984 Atarisoft

Status: Full Game, Findability: 2/5
Coding: Jim (?)
Graphics: Jon (?)
Sound: Jim (?)

You may be shocked to know, but Atarisoft were doing an official conversion themselves back in the early 80′s of Crystal Castles… not only didn’t their version get released,  but there was in fact another version developed a little earlier by a company called Thundervision.

We learn of the Atarisoft release thanks to Mat Allen who has documented the conversion briefly in Digital Press. It seemed at first that the game got caught up in the games crash, US Gold getting hold of the game in 1986, tidying it up and releasing it in limited form.

The original Atarisoft version was intended for Cart release, and Mat Allan recently found a prototype of it…

This has been backed up, and we’ve added the download link to the cart image above. The game itself is not hugely different, but its not quite as fully polished as the US Gold version.

However, interestingly around the time of the Atarisoft game – a company called Thundervision worked on what was believed to be an unofficial conversion.  Kurt Woloch informed GTW that he read a story from the programmer that the Thundervision game wasn’t made to get the licence to sell, and hence was leaked to the community to play.  This was some 1-2 years before US Gold released the game in the UK, but would have been around a similar time that Atarisoft could have released their version.

It suggests that the leak of the Thundervision game could have been the key reason why the completed Atarisoft game didn’t make it beyond prototype release stage.   Atarisoft no doubt would have had damaged sales overall had they proceeded to sell their version.

So was the leak of the Thundervision game the real reason why Atarisoft didn’t release their game and US Gold did?   We are not sure yet, but hope to hear soon from people involved to find out exactly what happened.

For now, check out the original version from Atarisoft, and compare against the superior Thundervision version. 

http://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/crystal-castles/#gtwtabs
